Monday, January 25, 2010

I was recently checking out some reviews of new music on Metacritic.com (I use the site more for movie reviews, for reasons I'm about to list) and couldn't believe what was ranked as their top picks, or top "rated" for 2009 so far...here it is (in order): Leonard Cohen, Animal Collective, something called Sun O))), Amadou & Mariam, Grizzly Bear, Manic Street Preachers, Dirty Projectors, Tanya Morgan, The Felice Brothers, and Japandroids. That's their list. I just looked up what Sun 0))) is and found that they are an American drone metal band. OK. But they have the 3rd best release this year??!! What about Levon Helm or Wilco or Maxwell? Of course I realize that all reviews are subjective, and the idea of Metacritic is to formulate one score based on a number of different reviews...but how good can their system be when it comes up with a ridiculous list like that? I don't care how good the Tanya Morgan record is, and I actually enjoy Leonard Cohen, but neither should be on a Top 10 list this year.